"A UNION OF TWO CITIZENS": Maggie Gallagher replies to Andrew Sullivan

Because Andrew is such a gifted writer, and gifted in particular at "framing" of issues, I am always particularly fascinated by his neologisms. They generally mean something.

In his exchange with the equally gifted David Frum, Andrew stresses that "A civil marriage is between two citizens and the state should not distinguish between sexual orientations any more than it should distinguish between other immutable characteristics, like race, or even mutable ones, like religion. I believe that government should be as neutral as possible and as restrained as possible in determining divisive and private issues like how a husband relates to his wife and vice versa. . . May the state be neutral in this social change, except in as much as it encourages social support for relationships as such."

Marriage as the union of two citizens? Where did Andrew get that idea? It is not literally true (you don't have to be a citizen of a country to contract a valid marriage there, and American law has never attempted to confine marriage the union of U.S. citizens).

But I suppose this new language is intended to suggest the ongoing process of the social desacralization of marriage, its diminuition into a civil right.

Why the state should shepherd its citizens into such two-person unions is a question Andrew is never able to answer persuasively. (By his own argument above the state should be neutral with regard to polygamy since that too is a relationship, and of course fidelity, since that too is one of many divisive personal and private issues about how husbands and wives should relate to one another.)

But I'm more interested in contesting his view, which I think is wholly false, that redefining marriage as union of citizens represents "neutrality." Same-sex marriage (as the Canadian courts have acknowledged) is a new, substantive vision of marriage, which the state will impose over and against the older "discriminatory" vision.
posted by Eve at 9:52 AM VOTE

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